Most analytics tools still rely on keywords to help you filter and analyze conversations. The problem is: how do you really know which keywords to look for? When people are talking about health care issues, do they really use the words “health care” in the discussion? Yes, you can develop a broad list of keywords, but, in the words of Tellagence CEO Matt Hixson, “marketers bring a lot of assumptions to the table.” So beyond keywords or demographics, how else can you define and understand your community and its concerns?

That’s why Tellagence, a social analytics company focused on analyzing communities and conversations, has launched Discover as a stand-alone tool for marketers who want to identify the real themes in the conversations happening around their brand. I saw a demo of what Tellagence can do last week, and it is a really powerful — and beautifully designed — tool.

You enter a topic — the example in these screenshots is based on the topic “health” — and Tellagence Discover will analyze the last 250,000 tweets, or the last 7 days of conversations, around that topic. What you get is a visualization showing frequently used words in that conversation. But here’s the kicker: while the large bubbles represent words used with high frequency, those don’t necessarily give you themes. Frequency could happen because someone with a large engaged follower base chimed in and generated a ton of retweets — but is that really what your customers are talking about?

To identify the real conversational themes, Tellagence highlights the conversational words that have a strong connection to other words: the words around which real conversations are happening. Drill down into one of those themes (Health > Food), and you’ll find other related themes. Maybe you’re marketing a product designed for parents who are concerned about the safety of the materials their kid’s baby bottles are made of: bingo. Health > Food > Kids is one of the sub-themes in this topic.

Now that you’ve identified the conversations you’re interested in, you can see all of the tweets related to that conversation, analyze them further in a grid view, and export them – along with all of the relevant meta-data you need to further analyze the content – to identify key influencers in that conversation. Whether you’re researching keywords or content strategies, or simply analyzing the strength of your brand (or your competitor’s), this is a really powerful way to gain true insights into the conversation.

Tellagence Discover is available at a price of $350 per use, with a limited offer of $315 during its current beta period.